Con Man Pillow Guy Has The “Cure” For The Coronavirus

The alleged “Christian” and con man Mike Lindell, The Pillow Guy, has been exposed in recent months for claiming to have the “cure” for the Coronavirus and making money from each “remedy” sold. Anyone can get over-exuberant and make a big mistake, but the overwhelming truth, facts and evidence exposing the “cure” as a fraud, and Lindell unwilling to admit his mistake and recant, simply exposes Lindell as the false Christian and con artist he is. The following is a basic summary of how and why oleandrin is no cure for Covid-19.

Lindell’s oleandrin scam follows the same pattern as all other snake-oil scams:

“The pattern, as we have reported previously, is now well-established. A complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM) entrepreneur secures a supply of an obscure natural product that has little to no current market value. Once they have essentially cornered the market they then promote the useless product as an exotic natural cure for whatever. They do this through the usual channels, but the holy grail is to get exposure through a CAM celebrity, like Dr. Oz. Once Dr. Oz features your product on his show, you rake in the snake oil lucre.” In this case the Pillow Guy is standing in for Dr. Oz.

Oleandrin is clearly a drug, but  Phoenix Biotechnology is trying to get the FDA to label it as a supplement to bypass FDA requirements for scientific evidence of safety and efficacy:

“As long as you don’t name a disease in the promotion, this powerful drug is magically a ‘supplement’. This shows how the category exists only to bypass the FDA. It is not a real science-based category at all – it’s a regulatory fiction. (True supplements are vitamins and minerals, not herbal drugs or any other ‘natural’ drug.)”

Total lack of scientific evidence:

"The science made public so far is a single pre-clinical study, showing that oleandrin has anti-viral activity against SARS-CoV-2 in a test tube (the study is pre-print and has not been peer-reviewed). That’s it. This is another common feature of the snake oil industry – tout products based upon preclinical data only. This kind of data may seem promising, and allows snake oil peddlers to claim their products are backed by scientific studies. But this kind of in-vitro study tells us very little about the activity of potential drugs in living organisms. Very, very few compounds that have ‘promising’ activity in vitro go on to become useful medicinals.  Among the many potential problems include what we call pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. How is the substance absorbed, where does it go in the body, how is it metabolized and eliminated, and how long does it last? Any one of these factors can be a deal-breaker.”

No studies on side effects:

“But even more important – what are the dose-specific desirable effects, side effects, and toxicities? In order for a drug to be useful there needs to be a sufficient dose range in which beneficial medical effects can be achieved without significant side effects or toxic damage to any organ. Again, many promising drugs fail because they cause kidney or liver damage – or fatal cardiac arrhythmias. In fact, it’s easy to find substances which kill viruses or bacteria in the petri dish. Many poisons (or bullets) will do this. The trick is to find substances that will inhibit or kill the virus at doses lower that those that cause toxicity to human cells.”

This is a basic outline of how REAL science works:

“Showing potentially useful activity in vitro is just the first step to finding a useful drug. It is not a very impressive step, as most such substances will eventually fail later research. We need more than one in vitro study to understand the potential harms and benefits of the drug. If it is still looking promising (unlikely but possible) then we need to do animal testing for both safety and possible effectiveness. If it survives animal testing (also unlikely) then we can proceed to preliminary human testing, just making sure it is safe and learning about how humans process the drug and how the drug affects humans. If the drug is looking safe in humans (phase 1 studies) then we can do preliminary efficacy trials, with further safety testing (phase 2). Then and only then can we do definitive double blind placebo controlled efficacy trials (phase 3).”

Tweet

Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.